The Impossible Dreamers
On the surface, this will seem an uncommon piece to post in the morning, seemingly just about entertainment, the kind of thing I usually post in the late afternoon. And on the surface it is. But that's not why I'm posting it now.
In the current Northwestern alumni magazine, they had a story about a recent production there of “Man of La Mancha” -- and included a link to a 15-minute “making of” video about it.
The video is extremely well-done, and much of it is very interesting (although it’s something one can jump through parts). However, what’s most interesting -- and the reason I'm posting it in the morning, usually what's been my "political slot" -- is that they re-focused the framing story. Normally, I don’t care much for doing that, but they came up with an extremely interesting concept.
There's a reason for telling this, so bear with me.
If you haven't seen "Man of La Mancha" (or not seen it in years), the story of Don Quixote is told with a bookending tale around it. The musical actually begins in a Spanish prison in 1597 when Miguel de Cervantes has been arrested an thrown into the infamous Seville prison (loosely inspired by real life, when Cervantes was a tax collector and had put the money he collected into a bank -- which went bankrupt, and the money was lost). The other rough prisoners already in prison when this newcomer arrives charge him with being a fool and a dreamer, and begin to ransack his possessions. And among all that is the manuscript of Don Quixote that Cervantes has been writing. The prisoners go to burn this silly waste of time. But Cervantes begs them not to and instead demands a trial, saying he can't be convicted as a fool without a chance to prove his innocence. And his defense is putting on an amusement, which is the tale of Don Quixote.
What Northwestern did is change the setting of this "framing" story. And instead of it taking place in the Seville prison of 1597, it occurs in a modern day ICE detention center on the U.S.-Mexican border, and all those prisoners are immigrants who have been arrested, awaiting deportation to countries unknown.
Whether this changed bookending works in full, I don’t know. (It very well may.) But I can tell from the video that it at least does work, and movingly, in part.
(I will add as a side note that Trump has frozen $787 million in research funds from Northwestern. And just a couple weeks ago, in order to hopefully take pressure off the university as a target, the school's president resigned. None of that had anything to do with theater department adapting the framing story, that's just coincidence -- work on the show had begun months before any of that happened, and the focus of the changes is, instead, on the ICE arrests and deportations. But it adds perspective to what ended up on stage. Because the funding was frozen on April 8. And the first performance of this production took place just two weeks later, on April 25.)
The whole video is interesting on how a college enterprise puts together a musical. And all the more so because the Northwestern theater department is high-end and renowned. It's not unreasonable to skim past some detailed parts, if the minutiae of theater is not your highest interest. But the video is very well-produced. However -- if you don’t want to watch the whole thing or even most of it, at the very least jump to the 13:00 mark for the last three minutes, where they show the final scene. That's the point of this. Trust me.
But so that you know what's going in the final scene --
After telling the story of Don Quixote -- where, in the end, this dreamer of a noble world who has chased a fantasy, dies, but not before those who thought him crazy are transformed by his life -- the story returns to the "present day" of the prison. And the inmates (who had played the roles during the story) are themselves profoundly moved by the story about the efforts of one man trying to fight for justice and goodness against all reasonable odds. They return the manuscript to Cervantes, as the prison guards arrive to take him and his manservant with their trunk of possessions to their trial -- and the prisoners serenade him off (with impressively soaring voices here) to his destiny, with a reprise, as you might imagine, of the show's most memorable song.
Starting at 13:00, watch the final scene to the very end of the video. This is why I'm posting it here. I hope some other schools and community theaters use this adaptation, at least for the time being.
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